by Irwin Shaw
My new Vermont slowly began to take shape within my head.
At first, I thought of buying a franchise to test my theory. I found that it would not be difficult. My millions and the possession of a nationwide television network, it was intimated to me, would make me most welcome to join the fraternity of club owners. But after consideration, I decided that putting together a single team of 43 players chosen from one season’s culls would prove nothing or almost nothing. Even the most obstinate of the believers in the present system could admit that by the law of averages, a mere handful of deserving athletes had for one reason or another been passed over in the early days of practice sessions. Even if the team I chose went on to win the Super Bowl in its first year, I might be at best praised for my acumen as an architect of victory, which would leave matters more or less where they stood before and bring the bitter taste of ashes to my mouth. I did not wish to be congratulated for gypsy luck or gypsy guile—what I wanted was a gigantic demonstration that the entire system of choice in the modern world was founded on illusion and the frivolity and towering egos of theory-bound gurus and false messiahs in all theaters of endeavor. The reputation of the class of men who had dismissed me and scores of other players after one week on a hot practice field would have to be shattered and the mindless belief in their powers held by their countless followers dissolved into dust.
I would have to create not one team but a confederation of teams, a league of rejects who would play a full, scheduled season of games, under the pitiless eye of the television camera and in the full glare of publicity, to choose a winner among them that could then challenge, successfully, the victor in the pompously named Super Bowl.
In the middle of the summer, when the dejected athletes were beginning to stream back to their homes from the training camps, I had my staff prepare lists of positions, addresses, phone numbers. All this was done quietly, without fanfare. Equally quietly, I made the round of cities that had what I considered suitable or at least tolerable stadiums. The major cities were, of course, already taken, but if Tampa could support a major-league football team, what forbade Tallahassee, Toledo, Trenton from also enjoying the pleasures of first-class sport? Out of decent respect for luck, I included Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, among my choices. My guarantees were in cash, the advantages of my having a television network at my disposal were mentioned, old favors were invoked. When necessary, politicians were bribed. In every case, I signed firm contracts for five-year leases. Actually, no risk was involved. From the point of view of my complicated relations with the Internal Revenue Service, a loss of venture capital over that period would prove more profitable than not.
The same reckoning applied to the contracts I offered the players. As I had anticipated, almost every one of them responded eagerly to my explanatory telegrams. They felt, as I knew they would, as I had on that fateful day when I was turned away, that they had been denied their fair chance at fame and fortune and were ready to jump at this unexpected second opportunity to prove themselves. There was to be no bargaining for terms—each man was to be offered the same sum, $30,000 a year for two years, with a no-cut clause and a no-limit insurance policy in case of injury.
The selected players themselves, their names taken at random out of a hat, were to elect their own head coaches, assistant coaches, club managers and staff. I promised in no way to interfere with the running of any of the clubs after the offensive and defensive 11s, the special teams and the taxi squads had been picked by lot in my office and assigned, again by lot, to the various cities with which I had contracted.
Many of the replies I received to my telegrams to the players I had rescued from lifelong obscurity were embarrassing in their expression of gratitude. One letter from a player who had probably majored in English literature contained a quotation from the works of Thomas Gray:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom ’d caves of
ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush
unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the
desert air.
“Dear Mr. Romanovici,” the scholar-athlete wrote, “I guarantee I will not blush unseen. Thanks to you.”
I welcomed him among the chosen in a letter written in my own hand.
Naturally, my activities did not go long unnoticed. Howls of pain rose from the owners of the established clubs, suits were filed in the courts—to no avail—the newspapers, those guardians of the public welfare, poured abuse on my head, as I had expected. One eminent syndicated sports columnist, who also was in much demand as a commentator for special events such as the Olympics and championship prize fights, reached a new low in competitive prose by writing, “The gypsy has raided the henhouse.” He was a peculiarly distasteful man, but I hired him at twice his yearly income to serve as chief commentator at the games of the new league. His attitude suffered a not surprising sea change in his new position and the authority of his famous voice made instant stars out of a good many of the players in my employ.
I refused to compete head on with the National Football League. Our games were played on Wednesday and Friday evenings, when the viewing public had recovered from the weekend satiety with the sport. At first, I refused all advertising sponsors, contenting myself with a modest announcement before the start of play at each half that the spectacle was being presented (tax-free for me) on behalf of one or another of my national companies. Because of this, I did away with the endless time outs and tasteless promotions of beer, razor blades, laxatives and armpit protection that made the viewer pay a high negative emotional price for his pleasure. This simple improvement met such a huge response with the public that before the first season was half over, I was besieged with offers from advertisers for the same minimum, low-key and now demonstrably effective exposure.
Another innovation that met with instant acclaim was the elimination of the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner before the start of each game. I had never seen the connection between watching an exercise in professional brutality and patriotism and the polls I had taken among the spectators on the spot and the television audience in their homes confirmed my belief that the usual roar that arose as the anthem came to its last notes was not a demonstration of allegiance to the nation but a sign of relief that the game was finally going to begin.
Indulging myself in a long-standing prejudice, I forbade the marching and foolish tootling of high school bands between halves. If my clients liked parades and martial music, they could join the Army. Instead, I picked rock combinations at random, merely by placing small advertisements in the specialized journals devoted to what has always seemed to me to be mindless noisemaking, but which I recognized as a part of our current culture, and had the groups that flocked to my office perform when the athletes were off the field. The change was greeted with screams of joy, especially among the younger element, as the pathetically underpaid musicians in outlandish costumes who answered my invitation blared away under the lights in the autumn evenings.
I even went so far as to improve the quality of the frankfurters and rolls to be hawked in the stands and the high percentage of sales per spectator was satisfactory evidence to me that the national palate had not been permanently ruined by the years of munching on plaster-of-Paris rolls and the sweepings of the abattoirs of America.
With all this, the experiment would have been a failure if the play itself had not been up to standard. By constant exposure, the public had become a body of sophisticated critics and they responded gratifyingly to the reckless ferocity shown by the athletes who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by giving their utmost efforts at every moment of the game. Professional football has been compared all too often to the gladiatorial combats of Rome, but here, at last, the simile almost achieved the status of actual fact rather than remaining another example of rhetoric born in the feverish minds of bemused journalists.
In short, in the first season, the Players’ League,
as I named it, turned out to be a huge success, but I made no claims and carefully refrained from issuing any challenges to the older league.
But the next year, when one of the less successful teams in the new confederation happened to be conducting pre-season practice in the same area in which one of the N.F.L. teams was preparing for the upcoming campaign, I innocently suggested to the owner of the club, who was a friend of mine and owed me a favor, that it might be useful to stage an informal scrimmage between the two teams. With no spectators or newspapermen present, of course. My friend did not leap at the opportunity and was not encouraged by the reactions of the other owners when the idea was presented to them. I reminded him, gently, of the favor he owed me, which was no less than keeping him out of Federal prison for at least three years, and he consented, with the worst grace possible.
The scrimmage was duly held, with ambulances coming and going. No scores were kept and no official word was vouchsafed to the newspapers, but the rumors were delightful. Two weeks later, my friend called me to say, bitterly, that it would have been better for him if he had spent the three years in prison.
Confident now of the future (wrongly, as it developed), I suggested no further relations between the leagues and through the season allowed the sportswriters to do their work. By December, the clamor for the meeting between the two champions was irresistible. I pretended to be loath to risk my inexperienced young men against the triumphant veterans of the N.F.L., and the clamor swelled into an uproar. There was even a speech on the subject on the floor of the Senate in which the doctrine of free enterprise was invoked and fair competition under the democratic rules of the game was mentioned. My hesitation paid off in my dealings with the N.F.L. and was reflected in certain concessions that were finally included in the contract, chiefly concerned with the percentages assigned to the two parties involved. But try as I would, I could not persuade the opposing lawyers to agree to the sale of the improved frankfurters and rolls I preferred. I am not a stubborn man and at the end gave in gracefully on this point.
We were lucky, or so it seemed at the time, that the race in our league was undecided until the last Sunday in December, which kept the attention of the public, especially the bettors among them, riveted to our games, while the championship in the N.F.L. had become a foregone conclusion early in October, with the Dallas team monotonously running up lopsided scores against all opposition and finishing the season undefeated, with the absurd combined total of 620 points gained to 34 points scored against them. At their own Super Bowl, they won 56 to 17 and there were empty seats in the stands.
By a happy coincidence (for me), Montpelier was the victor in our league and grimly went about its preparations for the test ahead of it.
The Sunday of the big game dawned clear and balmy. The Las Vegas line indicated a Dallas victory by 24 points. I had avoided Texas almost successfully during my career and was not prepared for the delirium, inflamed by drink, with which the natives of the Panhandle celebrated, well in advance, the massacre of the invaders from the North. One would have thought that Davy Crockett, smiling and in perfect health, had strode forth from the Alamo on Saturday evening.
The stadium was a bedlam of sound, even before the game and the warming-up period of the two teams and during the marching of the massed high school bands, a ceremony I had been unable to prohibit.
We won the toss and Montpelier received the kickoff. I was sitting, with my wife in one of the ornate boxes, high above the field, in which a family could live comfortably for months. At the beginning, I watched with composure as Montpelier ground out yardage and advanced steadily toward the Dallas goal. But even as the crowd groaned with each new first down, I began to feel uneasy. There was something methodical, craftily planned in the manner in which the Dallas defense yielded territory. It seemed to me, if not to the other spectators, that they were permitting Montpelier to gain, allowing plays to form and surge forward so as to be able to study, with disturbing serenity, the separate moves that constituted the Montpelier offense. Even before Montpelier scored within the first six minutes, I suspected ambush.
By the middle of the second quarter, my suspicions proved to have been all too well justified. After the first score, Montpelier hadn’t managed another first down. The Dallas defense was subtly rearranged and handled our best runners and pass receivers with ridiculous ease. Meanwhile, the Dallas offense moved the ball smoothly through huge gaps in the Montpelier line and their receivers were more often than not completely in the open for long receptions, short receptions and bruising and ground-devouring screen plays.
By that time, I was down on the field, on the bench, which now resembled an encampment of soldiery in full retreat, all hope gone, waiting only for the final blow that would sweep them all from the face of the earth. The coach, Bo McGill, who had led a Kansas high school team to a state championship, seemed to have fallen into a numb reverie as the score mounted against us, and even our spotters in their booth above the stands had drifted into dejected silence.
The crowd, wild at the beginning, was now delirious and amused itself by cheering us when we managed to gain inches on a play or when our quarterback, exceptionally, managed to get a pass off without being knocked off his feet, even if the pass harmlessly dribbled a few yards into territory where not a single Montpelier jersey could be seen.
On the bench, all thought seemed to have come to a complete and dreadful halt, as though every mind in what had been a group of intelligent and resourceful men had been subjected to a new and much improved industrial deep-freezing process. Needless to say, my mind was racing. In the heat of the moment, I felt, melodramatically, that everything I believed in, everything I had accomplished was faced with failure and doomed forever to mockery.
At the half, we were behind 27 to 7 and all indications pointed to a final score for Dallas of between 50 and 60 points. As we walked off the field to the accompaniment of loud, ironic applause, I had finished my calculations. I had figured out, or imagined I had figured out, why the disaster had overcome us. A team that had started out as inspired amateurs had through the trials of two seasons turned into experienced professionals. In other words, experts? Predictable, playing just the sort of game that Dallas had feasted on since August. The Dallas team was composed of experts, too, but superexperts, with long years of experience behind them. If we were to have any chance against them, we would have to play unpredictably, inexpertly, at random, ignoring completely the percentages and statistics that by now were burned into McGill’s consciousness as they were into the consciousness of every other professional coach.
The poor man was near tears as we reached the locker room, which resembled a forward medical station during the battle in the Ardennes rather than a football locker room. “Mr. Romanovici,” McGill said brokenly, as he pulled me aside to a corner of the room, “I hereby tender my resignation. I would like to remain indoors for the second half. Give out any story you wish—tell the papers I’ve had a heart attack or that I slipped and broke my leg—anything.…”
“Nonsense, man,” I said, putting a soothing hand on his arm. “You’ll do nothing of the kind. You’ll go out on the field with the team and you’ll look cunning and confident. You may even smile if you catch a camera pointed in your direction.”
“Smile, man,” McGill said. “I’m not going to smile again for the rest of my life. What is there to smile at?”
“We’re going to change our tactics,” I said.
“Change tactics!” McGill was spluttering now. “What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve tried every trick in the book.”
“In the book,” I said. “There’s the trouble. You’re now going to throw out the book.”
“What do you propose?” McGill asked, with just the merest hint of curiosity.
“First of all, we are now going to encourage the boys to block and tackle.” After our first touchdown, the power and deception of Dallas had thoroughly intimidated the Montpelier team and the blocking and t
ackling had gone from being tentative in the first quarter to a demonstration of the gentlest courtesy in the second.
“Block and tackle,” McGill groaned. “How do you expect to arrange that?”
“In a minute, I’m going to ask for silence in the locker room,” I said, “and I’m going to make a little speech.”
McGill hit his head in despair. “Mr. Romanovici,” he said, “these men are professionals. This isn’t a high school team that you fire up with a pep talk between halves. You could read them a new Sermon on the Mount and they’d still lose by forty points.”
“Listen to my speech,” I said and climbed onto a rubbing table and called for quiet. The room had not been noisy. There had been only a small whispering, like the fall of rain on a newly dug grave, until now, and that stopped abruptly at the sound of my voice. “Gentlemen,” I said loudly, “there is no need to dwell on our performance in the first half.”
A small sigh, like a vagrant wind, swept the room.
“We are now going to forget it and get on with the business of winning a ball game.” As I said this, two of the players sat down on the floor and turned their faces to the wall. “We are going to be a different team in this half. For one thing, as of this moment, there are no regulars on this squad. We are going to put in the suicide squad and they are going to stay in there, on both offense and defense, as long as it seems wise.”